When EJB 2.0 arrived I thought, 'Wow, EJB has finally arrived!' With Container Managed Relationships (CMR) and a standard query paradigm I thought the nirvana of portable data layer-independent applications was just a few keystrokes away.

Not surprisingly, the concept of design patterns originated in the world of architecture. A design pattern is a proven, reusable solution to a recurring problem.

Given the current global economic downturn, it is certainly no surprise that large organizations are putting cost-cutting measures at the top of their priority lists. This trend is particularly true in the information technology (IT) arena, as the overspending of the last few years and the associated lack of ROI has resulted in intense scrutiny on IT spending.

Just as service-based applications leverage a shared set of application resources, infrastructure-aware applications leverage a shared infrastructure that can adapt to meet the needs of the application.

When talking about enterprise application integration, we tend to think of using Web services technologies such as SOAP and UDDI to virtualize a data model across a large enterprise. The thinking is that with a consistent interface, the data stores of the company can be abstracted behind a Web services layer and reported in XML, which can then be kneaded to the particular needs of your application.

Component-based development (CBD) has been around for years. Anyone who has been a developer for any length of time has no doubt leveraged some form of reuse in an application.

The upcoming release of BEA's WebLogic Platform 8.1 marks a breakthrough in application infrastructure technology.

J2EE has arrived as the standard enterprise-computing platform for Web application development, and is gaining strength and popularity every day. J2EE supports legacy applications and interfaces, multiple operating systems, distributed and clustered environments, and high-volume mission-critical applications with support for security and managed operations.

What would happen if you had a stand-alone server, say an Admin Server having just a managed server? Or what if the Admin server itself becomes unresponsive. How would someone be notified when they became unresponsive?

Standards can drive revolutionary changes in technology: consider the impact that SQL has had on the database market, or consider that the World Wide Web was launched by the combination of HTML, HTTP, URL, and SSL. Our belief is that protocol standards (XML, Web services) and programming standards (Java and the .NET alternatives, XML Query, etc.) will have a similarly profound impact on integration.

In this article, I'll show you how to use the Unified User Profile in BEA WebLogic Portal. I look at the programming and configuration steps necessary to use the portal's built-in rules engine together with the external user profile data to provide a personalized portal presentation.

There are many reasons why organizations fear mainframe integration. Proprietary interfaces, radically different processing environments, lack of support for standard development APIs, and the fact that the people who created the applications have since 'moved on' are the most common factors identified when an organization postpones a mainframe integration project.

This article focuses on the User Management framework of WebLogic Portal. Specifically I will discuss a small portion of Portal's User Profile Management features by detailing how to customize Portal's User Manager functions and extend the User Management framework to build a robust Unified User Profile.

If you've ever worked as a Weblogic consultant, chances are this scenario will look all too familiar: You're at a high-profile client site as the 'BEA WebLogic Expert.' You were called in last minute because they are having 'intermittent' problems in their newly deployed production system. The problems appear related to the WebLogic (Server/P ortal/Integration) subsystem, but you can't be sure.

In recent years, Web portals have risen in popularity as a way of aggregating, organizing, and presenting content in a highly uniform, customizable, and personalized way. As the technologies that enable the creation and management of these Web portals have evolved, it is not only information content that is being offered, but application functionality as well.

Modern enterprises are drowning in a sea of information. Despite owning an ever-increasing volume of information, most enterprises cannot exploit it to even a fraction of its full potential. This is because the information is strewn across many systems with diverse data formats and interfaces - systems that are largely unaware of one another and of the relationships their content has with information contained elsewhere.

We know the mantra 'Content is King' with the Internet is legitimate. Many now ask, 'How do we make content a focus?' Whether you have a content-heavy Internet Web site or a vast base of enterprise content inside your corporate intranet, you want to provide your users with a quick and efficient way to access and produce relevant content.

BEA has begun the rollout of BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1, a new release of BEA's application infrastructure platform product, with powerful new functionality for building and integrating enterprise applications.

Enterprise application integration, now the centerpiece of corporate IT strategy, remains unacceptably high in cost and effort for one reason. Today's typical IT organization has separate environments for application development and integration.

In today's competitive business environment, success depends on the quality of information available and the sophistication with which it is used. Many companies successfully differentiate themselves with the quality of their information-handling systems. As technologists, our job is to build systems that fully leverage the information available within the enterprise. It's critical that these systems adapt seamlessly and efficiently to ever-changing business requirements.

Many articles have claimed that Java 2, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and .NET Web services are interoperable. What does this mean from a developer's perspective? What issues and problems arise as you actually do the work?

The typical enterprise relies on a mix of custom built and pre-packaged business applications using multiple technologies. Over the last decade, the Internet explosion drove the desire to make these applications available via the Web. Unfortunately, many companies exacerbated their existing IT fragmentation problem by developing 10s or 100s of Web sites to surface their silos of data and applications to users both internal and external to the enterprise.

Without exception, the Internet has dramatically changed the way business information is delivered and consumed. The proliferation of free information coupled with fee-based services that have migrated to the Web has proven overwhelming for the average knowledge worker. While every desktop is now a potential research library, few employees can afford the time necessary to seek out the information that can help them do their jobs.

Security is any mechanism that can be used to protect and validate resources. There are many security models that can be used to protect the data. The security model may use encryption, access control, or several other security methods. Authorization, or access control, has different security services that may be used to protect the resources. One method may be the Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS), and another is Windows 2000 Active Directory. This article focuses on the JAAS security service.

With the arrival of BEA WebLogic Server 7.0, a new security architecture with improved and expanded security features was introduced. The primary goal of that new architecture is to let you plug in security providers from different security vendors and to let them cooperate seamlessly with your J2EE applications.

WebLogic Server 7.0 offers a new, integrated approach to solving the overall security problem for enterprise applications. With this framework, application security becomes a function of the application infrastructure and is separate from the application itself. Any application deployed on WebLogic Server (WLS) can be secured either through the security features included with the server out of the box, by extending the open Security Service Provider Interface to a custom security solution, or by plugging in other specialized security solutions from major security vendors that the customer's enterprise standardizes on.

Through advanced clustering capabilities, BEA WebLogic Server-based e-business applications can be scaled across multiple servers. (Note: WebLogic Server supports multiple types of clustering, only one of which is relevant here - what is referred to as Web Clustering. In Web Clustering, the clustering of the HTTP or presentation layer of the Web application is addressed. This is what is referred to here.)

BI, a company that specializes in business improvement programs for a wide range of companies, leverages J2EE for many of its software solutions. In fact, we've had several J2EE-based applications in production for years. Our flagship online media redemption vehicle is one such application, and is one of our largest. The application is an online catalog, which participants can use to redeem media for products. This application was the catalyst for our move to WebLogic 7.0.

In the last issue of WebLogic Developer's Journal (Vol. 1, issue 12) we looked at some of the major features and functional areas of the new Security Framework in WebLogic Server 7.0. Now let's take a closer look at how WebLogic Server 7.0 implements the primary task areas of a security system, which are authentication (determining a user's identity as a valid user), authorization (determining a user's role or roles and computing the appropriate access privileges based on the policies in place), and other essential areas of the WebLogic Security Framework.

The BEA (http://dev2dev.bea.com) dev2dev Team went global this fall with the first-ever 'dev2dev Days' events taking place (with sold-out crowds!) in 11 cities. This one-day, code-level training event offered developers, development managers, and architects a comprehensive look at the new BEA WebLogic Platform 7.0, as well as a peek into some upcoming BEA technology releases.

Installing and maintaining security is a huge challenge for an IT organization. To serve a worldwide network of Web-based users, the IT organization must address the fundamental issues of maintaining the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the system and its data. Security across the infrastructure is a complex business that requires vigilance and established and well-communicated security policies and procedures.

Those who understand e-business know that the Internet has forever changed the business world. More and more successful companies are harnessing and exploiting the power of the Internet to maintain a competitive advantage.

Companies that aspire to lead their industries continue to find ways to optimize themselves in an endless pursuit of excellence. The race is on for many leading companies to leverage technology and provide enriched online services to their customers in order to maintain their positions and, in some cases, distinguish themselves from their competitors.

Organizations deploying rich client/server WebLogic applications need to fill the void created by the deprecation of BEA Zero Administration Client (ZAC). The affiliated Delta Dental Plans of Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, a leading dental plan administrator, chose Sitraka DeployDirector to deploy the client-side portion of their claims-processing application to thier users.

When J2EE was still in its nascent stage, ATG took a bold step, becoming one of the first vendors to provide a similar framework for enterprises to build their applications on. Though largely based on Java, their technology did not adhere to any of the earlier J2EE specifications.

The most challenging integration efforts frequently involve integrating enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) systems with new and existing custom applications. These enterprise software applications often have proprietary architectures and complex APIs, and use proprietary programming languages unfamiliar to the mainstream developer community. However, some enterprise software vendors are attempting to make the integration effort more approachable. Using XML and Web services, these vendors are attempting to bridge the gaps between their respective products and the world around them.

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is a very popular topic these days. Businesses, as well as government entities at the local, state, and federal level, are all struggling to integrate their critical yet disparate information systems.

Integration is the biggest challenge facing IT organizations. The glass house controls much of the business-critical data in the enterprise, and traditional integration tactics, while complex and often proprietary, are still king.

Security is a priority for most of our customers. As more and more customers adopt Web services, they find a need to understand how Web services can be secured and what authentication mechanism to use.

The concept of persisting a user session during the interaction with an application server has matured from maintaining hidden HTML fields and toying with URLs to a stable and robust technology under the J2EE framework.